Celeron PCs Not Ready For Prime Time
By Jonathan Blackwood
Even the best manufacturer can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. Cases in point:
Hewlett-Packard's Brio 8334 and Global Computer Supplies' Systemax Mediamax 266C.
The sow's ear, in this case, is Intel's new 266MHz Celeron, a cacheless, inexpensive
Pentium II. Intel has historically believed the way to play to the low-end market is to take an
excellent product and diminish it in some way (remember the 486SX?). The removal of the
expensive cache causes the diminution in Celeron's case, and application performance suffers
as a result.
What was Intel thinking? For some time, the company has trumpeted the superiority of the
new Slot One mother-boards (used by its Pentium II processors) over the older Socket 7
designs (used by its MMX-enabled Pentium and by AMD, Cyrix and IDT processors), in
part because the design allows the level 2 cache to run at half the speed of the processor
itself. Socket 7 designs relegate the level 2 cache to run considerably slower-at the speed of
the motherboard instead. By removing the level 2 cache from Celeron systems, Intel has
thrown away the Pentium II's advantage.
Systems powered by competing chips from AMD and Cyrix can be priced as low as or lower
than Celeron, include 512KB of level 2 cache, and run business apps much faster. For that
matter, systems powered by a 233MHz MMX Pentium with level 2 cache (like our former
reference system Dell Dimension XPS M233s) run business apps such as Word, Excel,
Photoshop and AutoCAD faster than Celeron PCs.
HP Brio 8334
Hewlett-Packard targets its Brio line of systems at small-business users. Model 8334
comes in a midtower case with components that include a 266MHz Celeron processor, 32MB
of RAM, a 3.8GB hard disk and an integrated S3 Trio 64V2 video controller with 2MB of
RAM on the motherboard. A VTI 16-bit sound card is installed, but there are no speakers.
Our test system didn't come with a monitor, but HP has a range to choose from. The 8334's
keyboard has a number of extra programmable keys to let you perform functions like accessing
the Internet. Otherwise, it's a normal Windows 95 keyboard with a decent tactile response. |
